The Impossible star turned down the role of Spock in Star Trek

Ask any actor to name the performance that made him want to become an actor, and you’ll have people citing the likes of Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. Meryl Streep in “Sophie’s Choice” Or Denzel Washington in “Malcolm They want to leave the audience crying and cheering as they capture the full scope of the human experience. They don’t want to play, say, a monotonous robot whose only job in the plot is to provide the occasional info-dump. This would leave them with nothing interesting to do and, most likely, little to add to their narrative.

So, when Gene Roddenberry started acting Pilot for “Star Trek” In 1964, he might not have had actors knocking on his door to play Vulcan First Officer Spock, whose commitment to logic and lack of emotion seemed like a dull assignment alongside the impulsive Captain James T. Kirk and the arrogant Medical Officer Leonard. “Bones” McCoy. Obviously no one knew at the time how the character would be developed, nor could they have predicted the series’ profound pop cultural impact, so this isn’t a case of almost every leading man in Hollywood turning down John McClane in “Die Hard” before. 20th Century Fox has dropped an unprecedented $5 million on TV star Bruce Willis. They only had the pilot script to go on.

That’s why an up-and-coming actor turned down an iconic role to star in Mission: Impossible.

Martin Landau had already made his mark as James Mason’s murderous henchman in 1959 Alfred Hitchcock’s classic “North by Northwest” When Roddenberry and NBC offered him the role of Spock in the Star Trek pilot called The Cage. Landau flatly rejected them because, as he said Starlog In 1986, “He Can’t Play With Wood.” Instead, he played master of disguise Rollin Hand in the first three seasons of Mission: Impossible.

Again, to be fair, Landau didn’t know that the series would turn into a cultural phenomenon that is still producing new shows and movies 59 years after its premiere on the network. But even if it was king Upon learning of this, Landau says he still would have declined the offer. As he told Starlog:

“I would make the same decision today. But I knew that if the show worked, Spock would be very effective. You have to think about the turmoil of the 1960s. A super-intelligent creature with pointy ears who logically believed he was absolutely right – except I didn’t want to act that out; I didn’t want to be burdened with playing a character without feeling like, in fact, newscasters were more emotional than Spock.

If you thought such disrespect for Spock would have angered Leonard Nimoy, think again. Landau and Nimoy were very close friends. When the latter died in 2015, Landau wrote a moving remembrance of his friend For timedescribing him as a man. “Although our first meeting was cordial, we both realized that we could play the same roles, and we would obviously be contenders for those roles,” he wrote, adding: “It so happened. Over the years and with the passage of time, our careers took different turns, and we remained… Always friends and happy with our individual success, our respect for each other grew (…).”

As for Landau’s post-“Mission: Impossible” career, he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton’s brilliant “Ed Wood,” so not playing Spock was good for him.